The Artisan is an Artist

Reclaiming Indian Indigenous Craft from the Economy of Exploitation

Across India’s diverse and deeply rooted artisanal traditions, the act of making has long been embedded in cosmology, community, and land. Potters in Rajasthan, dyers in Kutch, bronze casters in Bastar, and weavers in Assam have inherited not only techniques, but entire systems of environmental attunement, aesthetic judgment, and philosophical orientation. Yet, within dominant frameworks of cultural policy, art history, and development economics, the Indian craftsperson is often cast as a labourer—an executor of heritage, rather than its author.

This misrecognition is neither accidental nor recent. It is the product of layered erasures rooted in colonial classifications, caste hierarchies, and capitalist production models. As cultural theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, “Historical time as coded by modernity has tended to render other modes of life as backward or incomplete” (Provincializing Europe7). Indigenous artisanal practices, situated in non-industrial temporality and collective memory, are often framed as pre-modern and in need of “revival” or “intervention.” Such framings obscure the epistemological value of craft itself.

The postcolonial state has, at times, reproduced this marginalisation through programs that celebrate the object while ignoring the subject. Artisans are often represented in state exhibitions and international trade fairs, but they are rarely acknowledged as artists in their own right. Instead, they are instrumentalised as “beneficiaries” of development schemes or as anonymous bearers of intangible cultural heritage. These designations reinforce a division between the intellectual and the manual, the designer and the worker, the artist and the artisan.

This paper addresses this division by arguing for the recognition of the indigenous Indian craftsperson as an artist and epistemic agent. It examines the theoretical foundations of this misrecognition, traces its colonial and casteist continuities, and offers alternative frameworks drawn from craft theory, anthropology, and indigenous oral testimony. By centering the knowledge systems of artisans themselves, the paper proposes a shift from viewing craft as commodity to engaging it as consciousness.

The binary between "art" and "craft" is not a native framework within Indian aesthetic or artisanal traditions. Rather, it was introduced during the colonial encounter and reinforced through systems of classification and control. Under British rule, traditional Indian objects were observed, catalogued, and displayed in museums and international exhibitions under the term “handicrafts”—a category which implicitly separated the work of Indian makers from the domain of "fine art" associated with European painters and sculptors.

The 1851 Great Exhibition in London, for instance, featured Indian textiles, woodwork, and metalware as “exotic specimens” of Eastern craftsmanship. The artisan was not named; only the object was framed. Colonial administrators like George Birdwood and Lockwood Kipling referred to crafts as traditional, community-based, and “non-intellectual”—as if the work of the Indian craftsperson did not involve formal innovation, conceptual design, or individual authorship. As Partha Mitter notes, British colonial exhibitions classified Indian art “not by the creativity of the artist but by the materials and methods used” (Mitter 45). This essentialised view de-intellectualised the Indian maker and reduced their cultural labour to manual technique.

This reclassification was compounded by existing caste structures. Many hereditary craft practices in India have historically been sustained by artisan castes whose social location already marked them as inferior within the varna system. For instance, leatherwork by Chamars, metal casting by Vishwakarmas, or weaving by Julahas were often undervalued socially, even though their technical and aesthetic mastery was exceptional. Colonial bureaucracy, instead of dismantling these hierarchies, codified them within census reports, occupational registries, and education policies.

The convergence of colonial and caste hierarchies thus created the figure of the artisan as a skilled but subaltern subject—fit for labour, not for authorship. This view continues to shape perceptions within the postcolonial state and market systems, where craft is celebrated for its beauty but often detached from the agency of its maker.

In many indigenous craft traditions, the knowledge of making is not transmitted through texts or formal institutions but through body, time, and relationship. It is an epistemology that is lived rather than codified. The artisan learns not only with the eyes but with the spine, the fingers, and the breath—absorbing knowledge through proximity, repetition, and ritual. This form of embodied knowledge has been central to Indian artisanal practices for centuries. A potter’s hands know the moment when clay shifts from plasticity to structure. A weaver can sense the tension in the warp by the sound it makes under the shuttle. A dyer, like the Khatris of Kutch, reads colour through the feel of the fabric’s dampness. These acts are not intuitive in the mystical sense but are precise forms of knowing honed over generations.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold, in The Perception of the Environment, writes that making is not the application of a plan to inert matter, but a “correspondence” with material flows. The artisan, he argues, does not impose form upon nature but works withits tendencies. This way of thinking is evident in Indian crafts, where raw material is not passive but responsive. The grain of wood, the saturation of a dye, the humidity in the air—all contribute to the outcome.

Modern design education and commercial production often overlook this relational intelligence. In its place comes the “design intervention,”which brings external templates, standardised methods, and aesthetic guidelines to rural craft clusters. While such interventions may enhance market visibility, they often displace the artisan’s autonomy, making them executors of external visions rather than authors of their own. By understanding indigenous craft as a form of consciousness, rooted in land, memory, and care, we begin to recover its philosophical dimensions. Craft here is not decorative, nor merely utilitarian. It is a cultural system, a pedagogy, and a cosmology.

Today, Indian artisans continue to be exploited through systemic structures that extract value without recognising authorship. In the name of “revival” or “preservation,” artisans are often drawn into commercial systems that rely on their skill but deny them aesthetic or intellectual credit. Designers, curators, NGOs, and fashion houses frequently serve as intermediaries between the craftsperson and the market, positioning themselves as “translators” or “innovators” while the artisan becomes invisible in the final narrative.

This dynamic is what we refer to as the design mediation complex—a network of institutions that aestheticise the craft object while marginalising the maker. The contemporary marketplace often demands documentation, digital presence, and branding—things that lie outside the artisanal mode of knowledge. In many cases, artisans are contracted for pieces that are co-designed but only the urban designer is credited in exhibitions, catalogues, or press features. The artisan remains part of the supply chain, not the intellectual ecosystem.

This erasure is intensified by asymmetries in education, language, and social capital. Urban-based institutions determine what counts as innovation, and which practices are worth funding or archiving. When artisan communities are spoken for rather than listened to, their work is reshaped to fit market desires—faster production cycles, trend-responsive aesthetics, or “ethnic” branding for global audiences.

What is lost in this process is the ethical ground of craft: its connection to place, its meditative temporality, and its subtle ethics of care. To call the artisan an artist is not just a matter of prestige; it is a matter of equity. It is to return voice, vision, and agency to those who have long been excluded from the categories of intellectual life. To reclaim the craftsperson as an artist is not an act of generosity; it is an act of correction. The indigenous artisan in India does not need to be elevated into the category of “artist” as defined by Western modernism. Rather, we must dismantle the binaries that created the division in the first place. The artisan is already an artist, a designer, a philosopher, and a custodian of knowledge.

At Takshni, we believe that acknowledging this requires more than discourse.It requires ethical frameworks of collaboration, equitable compensation, long-term relationships, and public platforms where artisans speak for themselves. Curation must become co-authorship. Design must become dialogue. Representation must be grounded in listening. Only then can Indian craft be reimagined not as an industry of objects but as a consciousness that continues to shape how we live, create, and relate to the world around us.